Now, creating a digital magazine is much easier. With web tools, students can layout their writings, pick from hundreds of cool fonts, and add their own images or choose from a library of stock images. Some web tools allow students to embed video and audio. Below I’ve listed some free educational web tools for creating a class ezine.

There have been complaints leveraged against out of the box robots like Dash and Dot, Ozobot, Hummingbird, Sphero. The complaints usually revolve around the canned and prescriptive nature of their uses and programs, that they lack creative engagement by the younger users. I personally love the excitement my learners have using these robots. As with…

The main characters in a story drive plot, attract readers’ empathy (or loathing) and carry your story along. Understanding how to write a lovable, loathsome, or otherwise engaging main character is a vital skill to develop. Read on for definitions, examples and tips to make your primary characters memorable:

"When people talk about the future of learning, they often mention technology and engineering. Things like Sphero balls and Arduino sets and coding projects. While I love the emphasis on STEM and STEAM, I can’t help but wonder if maybe we miss out on the power of journalism because it isn’t shiny and new.

"However, if you ask people what type of technology skills students will need in the future, you’ll hear things like digital citizenship, media literacy, and creative thinking. Unfortunately, schools tend to teach these topics in isolation, as if they exist in separate little buckets.

"But journalism takes the buckets and mixes them all together. Here, these ideas overlap constantly."

In today's political climate one might underestimate the power and the importance of the media, but every day we are influenced by one journalistic voice or another. Journalism is changing for many reasons. It's import isn't likely to decrease though what it offers the world may continue to evolve.

The OPTIC Strategy is a 5-step method used to analyze visuals. The strategy can be used to analyze any visual work.

Using the OPTIC Strategy can help you to prepare for the AP exam, but it can also provide you with a framework of analysis to be used in a wide variety of situations: tell your boss if the new billboard will get the right message across, analyze a website for a little extra money on the side, or impress a date with an intellectual analysis of a painting at the museum.

Now that you know when to use it, it’s time to get to how. The five steps are (1) overview, (2) parts, (3) title, (4) interrelationships, and (5) conclusion. Now for a more useful study guide, check out the infographic below.

Writing can be an incredible tool for learning and understanding complex ideas. Writing can help you organize your thoughts, ascribe meaning to new concepts and see your own misconceptions about a topic. When you write, you connect ideas in ways you wouldn’t by just thinking about them.

This set of OWL resources aims to help engineering instructors and TAs create and assess a variety of short, low-overhead writing exercises for use in engineering courses. The primary focus here is on “writing to learn” assignments, which leverage writing to improve students’ conceptual understanding of technical concepts.

From The Scout Report

"The Purdue OWL recently created this helpful resource for incorporating writing instruction into engineering classrooms, which may be useful for engineering instructors and teaching assistants. Created with support from the National Science Foundation's Research Initiation Grant in Engineering Education (RIGEE), these resources are designed with two purposes. The first is to support students in developing their writing skills; the second, to help students understand engineering concepts through writing exercises. With these dual aims in mind, this collection highlights six kinds of writing prompts that instructors might use with engineering students. These consist of conceptual writing prompts aimed at asking students to explain engineering concepts, such as fluid mechanics, in writing. Others include explain-a-problem writing prompts, which are designed to accompany engineering computational problems; how stuff works writing prompts (one example: "Explain how the gears of a bicycle work? What is changing when you change gears?"); real-world example writing prompts; design-a-problem writing prompts; and open-ended design writing prompts (one example: "Design a viewing platform that hangs over the Grand Canyon.")"

Over the last couple of months I've found and written about a number of really great tools and resources to help improve our students' writing skills. This is a collection of links to reviews of ten of the best.

[You owe it to yourself to read this. Despite what I thought I knew, I found it harrowing. -JL]

"When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads. (I’m what some call a Facebook “lurker.”)

"But when I opened my file, it was like opening Pandora’s box.

"With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.

"There was so much that Facebook knew about me — more than I wanted to know. But after looking at the totality of what the Silicon Valley company had obtained about yours truly, I decided to try to better understand how and why my data was collected and stored. I also sought to find out how much of my data could be removed.

"How Facebook collects and treats personal information was central this week when Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, answered questions in Congress about data privacy and his responsibilities to users. During his testimony, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly said Facebook has a tool for downloading your data that “allows people to see and take out all the information they’ve put into Facebook.” (Those who want to download their own Facebook data can use this link.)

"But that’s an overstatement. Most basic information, like my birthday, could not be deleted. More important, the pieces of data that I found objectionable, like the record of people I had unfriended, could not be removed from Facebook, either."

Josh Allen began his career teaching kindergarten abroad in a completely analog classroom; flashcards, a laminator and a weekly visit to the local print shop were as high tech as it got. And while he felt students were making positive gains, they were lacking a real voice in the classroom and choice in their learning. Today, Josh is an Education Associate at Buncee ; the creation and presentation tool for K through 12 learners across the globe. Buncee turns students of all ages into digital storytellers able to engage with and visualize their learning in infinite ways. Josh Allen was joined by Eda Gimenez to discuss and demonstrate Buncee at the EdLab seminar in February of 2018.Watch the full seminar on Vialogues.

On this site, we’re all about visual literacy, and some of our most popular features — from our Monday What’s Going On in This Picture? photojournalism exercise to our Friday Film Club to our daily Picture Prompts — were invented to use great New York Times multimedia storytelling to help students better understand the news, our culture and how current events can relate to their lives.

But as more and more schools are teaching with graphic novels, as a superhero movie has become such a hit that educators on Twitter are collaborating on a #WakandaCurriculum, and as our own newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting done in the form of a comic strip, we decided it was time for the comics genre to get its own lesson plan.

Below, we’ve brought together a wealth of Times resources and suggested ways to teach and learn with them. We’ve also posed a related Student Opinion question, “What Have You Learned From Comics?” that is based on an essay we asked George Gene Gustines, the Times comic-book-industry reporter, to write for us. Please invite your students to weigh in.

"Did you know that researchers have found that children's persuasive writing abilities develop more slowly than any other genre (Applebee, Langer, & Mullins, 1986)? That means that it is essential that we get students writing persuasively as often as possible. One of the best ways to motivate students to write persuasively is with really fun and engaging writing topics. In addition, when we give students different types of ways to write persuasively from speeches to critical reviews, we can really engage students.

"In the spirit of getting students writing, I've compiled 15 of my favorite topics and styles of persuasive writing. These ideas are sure to get your students excited about writing persuasively!"

In this teaching resource, we suggest nine exercises to use music to inspire student writing — from creating annotated playlists and critical reviews to music-inspired poetry and personal narratives. Each idea pulls from Times reporting, Opinion pieces and multimedia on music to give students a place to start. The activities are categorized according to three genres: creative and narrative writing; informative and explanatory writing; and persuasive and argumentative writing.

SOAPSTone is an analytical strategy that you can use when reading texts, writing about texts and planning original writing. There are 6 steps that make up the analytical process of the strategy (and the acronym).

DIDLS is a strategy for analyzing tone. It usually applies to a written or oral text. . It's an acronym that stands for diction, imagery, details, language and structure. To begin your analysis, it helps to have

No matter what happens writing is a skill we will always need. It's one of the only skills that the need for it has gone unchanged in the age of technology. In fact, it's almost more needed because of online writing! Remember, when you post on social media you are writing! While writing is a must, it's also HARD! Thankfully, Google has given us the power of Chrome Extensions, and developers have given us writing help! Here are five chrome extensions that will help you (and your students) improve your writing!

Writing teachers know that students need to write a lot and get meaningful feedback in order to improve their writing. We also know what it feels like to be buried under a pile of student writing that needs to be read and commented on, and although there are many strategies that can help us deal with this paper load, it’s still a daunting part of our work with students.

When I initially considered conferencing with each and every student in my classes to reduce the need for written comments, I was apprehensive about the time commitment, but with the help of a colleague who had made it work in his classroom, I recently took the plunge and did writing conferences with my students—and it had a huge impact on my classroom and my students’ learning.

"The Haiku Foundation (THF) is a non-profit organization that aims to "preserve and archive the accomplishments of our first century of haiku in English, and to provide resources for its expansion in our next." On the foundation's Educational Resources page, K-12 and college educators will find resources for integrating haiku into the classroom. These resources are organized by grade level and are designed to complement existing language arts curriculum. Resources include lesson plans, classroom handouts, and "teaching stories" (reflections from educators who incorporated haiku into their classrooms). Most lesson plans on this website were designed by THF president Jim Kacian and by poet Ellen Grace Olinger, Ed.D. Additional lesson plans were contributed by poets Brad Bennett and Tom Painting."

Many celebrated writers have championed the creative benefits of keeping a diary, but no one has put the diary to more impressive practical use in the creative process than John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968). In the spring of 1938, shortly after performing one of the greatest acts of artistic courage — that of changing one’s mind when a creative project is well underway, as Steinbeck did when he abandoned a book he felt wasn’t living up to his humanistic duty — he embarked on the most intense writing experience of his life. The public fruit of this labor would become the 1939 masterwork The Grapes of Wrath — a title his politically radical wife, Carol Steinbeck, came up with after reading The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Howe. The novel earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was a cornerstone for his Nobel Prize two decades later, but its private fruit is in many ways at least as important and morally instructive.

Alongside the novel, Steinbeck also began keeping a diary, eventually published as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (public library) — a remarkable living record of his creative journey, in which this extraordinary writer tussles with excruciating self-doubt (exactly the kind Virginia Woolf so memorably described) but plows forward anyway, with equal parts gusto and grist, driven by the dogged determination to do his best with the gift he has despite his limitations. His daily journaling becomes a practice both redemptive and transcendent.

Steinbeck had only two requests for the diary — that it wouldn’t be made public in his lifetime, and that it should be made available to his two sons so they could “look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes and to know to some extent what manner of man their father was.” It stands, above all, as a supreme testament to the fact that the sole substance of genius is the daily act of showing up.

Over the last couple of months I've found and written about a number of really great tools and resources to help improve our students' writing skills. This is a collection of links to reviews of ten of the best.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.